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At the international level, President Bush focused his blame on the French government, which he summarily accused of weakness of will. In singling out the French opposition, however, he concealed the fact that his war resolution would not even have garnered a simple majority on the Security Council of the United Nations. And although he continued to appeal to UN resolutions to establish the legitimacy of a war, he essentially repudiated the admittedly messy and imperfect democratic process the United Nations is supposed to instantiate. At the national level, we have been pounded with assertions of fact, for example about Iraq’s relation to terrorism, but systematically deprived of any hard evidence to support and interpret them. A democratic decision procedure is impossible without reasonable access to the relevant information. The last time America went to war on the basis of the word of its leaders, more than 50,000 young Americans and untold numbers of Vietnamese people died, for reasons the force of which remains uncertain. One conceivable motivation for favoring democracy is that there is more in two heads than in one, and that the judgment of a few is sufficiently fallible to require constant checking by the judgment of the many. But the uninformed judgment of the many can provide no check at all. I mention these two examples of anti-democratic behavior to examine briefly some common views about the role of the university in a democracy. Some claim that the university is supposed to put forth an exemplary instance of democracy, a forum in which opinions are allowed free flow. Opinions should flow freely in a university, but the university is not a democracy. In a democracy, everyone is entitled to equal representation in the process whereby the principles of social order are selected. In the university (by which I mean a community of inquiry), by contrast, representation is not an entitlement – it is an achievement. To count as a participant in a community of inquiry, one must live up to often exacting standards. Not all opinions deserve equal representation. Still, precisely by virtue of this discriminating, “non-democratic” nature, the university is able to make a crucial contribution to democracy. Plato worried that democracy was bound to be the rule of the unenlightened. Some maintain, accordingly, that it is a distinctive task of the university to answer that worry by supplying an essential kind of information to the democratic debate. (To be sure, it is not the business of the university to establish certain kinds of singular facts (e.g., about Iraq’s relation to terrorism), which is arguably the task of journalism. Its business is rather to uncover and examine the broader context in which these singular facts get their determinate significance: not only broad historical, social and cultural facts, but also the principles about what relevance such facts have in a truly informed judgment.) But this view conflicts with yet another, according to which the university (as an institution) should actively take sides in the political debate. For the university’s role as a forum of rigorous inquiry, insofar as it requires a kind of impartiality, stands in tension with its purported role as a party in the debate this inquiry is supposed to inform. The perception of bias this partiality creates may well effectively undermine the ability to bring enlightenment to the democratic process. If the university were to choose, as its primary responsibility, to answer Plato’s worry, then, it may have to reconsider its self-image as either an exemplar of democracy, or as an active force in political debate. —Bernard Reginster
At the March 15th conference, “Imaging, Imagination and Memory: Racial, Gender, and Political Violence,” we began with words about “Shock and Awe”—the U.S. war strategy to drop in 24-48 hours thousands of bombs (mostly on civilians—half of Baghdad is children) to bring about a quick “victory.” Imaging resistance rather than genuflection before imperial violence evoked my memory of activists during the Vietnam War who beat “swords into plowshares.” So, I read from *Imprisoned Intellectuals* a passage from Daniel Berrigan’s 1972 “Letter to the Weathermen,” written by a priest who was underground, one who had burned draft cards and damaged weapons of mass destruction: “I think a sensible, humane movement operates at several levels at once if it is to get anywhere. So, it says communication, yes; community, yes; sabotage, yes—as a tool. That is the conviction that took us where we went, to Cantonsville. And it took us beyond, to this night. We reasoned that the purpose of our act could not be simply to impede the war, or much less to stop the war in its tracks. God help us; if that had been our intention, we were fools before the fact and doubly fools after it, for in fact the war went on. Still, we undertook sabotage long before any of you. It might be worthwhile reflecting on our reasons why. We were trying to say something first of all about the pernicious effect of certain properties on the lives of those who guarded them or died in consequence of them. And we were determined to talk to as many people as possible and as long as possible afterward, to interpret, to write, and through our conduct, through our appeal, through questioning ourselves again and again to discuss where we were, where we were going, and where people might follow. My hope is that compassion and affection and nonviolence are now common resources once more, and that we can proceed on one assumption, the assumption that the quality of life within our communities is exactly what we have to offer. I think a mistake in [the] past was to kick out any evidence of this community sense as weakening, reactionary, counter-productive. Against this it must be said that the mark of inhumane treatment of humans is a mark that also hovers over us. And it is the mark of a beast, whether its insignia is the military or the movement.” —Joy James
At the heart of what it is to be a University is a love of learning and the deep belief that understanding, even wisdom, can develop in a life committed to learning. If this is an accurate description of our shared vocation at Brown—everyone a teacher, each a student, all in search of knowledge that transforms human existence for the better, then war in any place, for any cause, feels to me like we failed somehow. While each war derives of multiple forces and each outbreak deserves idiosyncratic consideration, it is always an excess of violence that reason and temperance failed to prevent. The admonition that we too often associate with Mr. Rogers and small children: “Use your words” came too late. In the musical play “Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead” there is a moment when the main characters rowing together in the fog say to one another: ‘Somewhere in this there was moment we could have said “no”’. The humor of their helplessness points toward the balance we struggle to find. Caught in the currents of accountability, fear, frustration, loyalty, and even shame we strive to stay afloat with sacred purpose in the larger longer currents of human existence. We are neither the first nor the last to fail, to fight, to feel remorse, to seek hope. “Keep justice and do righteousness, for soon my salvation will come and my deliverance be revealed” writes the prophet Isaiah. The text challenges us to continued pursuit of wisdom. Brown’s vocation and ours within remains incomplete and worth of engagement. But it is with sorrow that war comes and our hearts need both comfort and reassurance. These will only come with honest assessment of our usefulness and reputation in both the loss and nurture of human life in our generation. —Janet Cooper-Nelson
Universities are institutions which read, think, reflect, evaluate; and the current international situation is steeped in inviting symbolism: of a president so ill at ease with his own legitimacy that his every declaration appears grotesque and overdetermined; of a global economic and military power discrepancy so enormous that a deep and proper sense of shame has been displaced into defensiveness, paranoia and aggression. How else to explain the determination of this administration to ignore the global community with such blatant disregard for international law? The global situation today resembles the colonial world analysed by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth: “a world cut in two,” a world in which violence is not a “threat,” or an “imminent possibility,” but a distortion of reality which chronically affects every international exchange or declaration which takes place under its aegis. Universities are also highly symbolic institutions of the values of learning, intellectual freedom, disinterested rationality, enlightenment, modernity, civilization values which, by their association with a power which is preparing to impose its will on a decimated country and people, take on the qualities of “lifeless, colorless knick-knacks”; become “collections of dead words,” to quote Fanon again. At such a time, the universityˆs very identity and rationale is under threat. Action against the war is also action to reclaim the values which brought us here in the first place. —Timothy Bewes
In this dark time, I anticipate the pride we faculty, staff and administration members are certain to feel at the participation of Brown students in the efforts to restore world peace, limit the ecological castrophe in the making, and help citizens of all other nations to understand our solidarity with their overwhelming sentiment, as well as the depth of our opposition against the policies of the White House. —Paul Buhle
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